Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), in collaboration with international partners, have shown that ocean temperature patterns help limit the global spread of droughts.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), in collaboration with international partners, have shown that ocean temperature patterns help limit the global spread of droughts. Published in Communications Earth & Environment, the study analysed climate data from 1901–2020 and found that synchronised droughts affected between 1.8% and 6.5% of global land, far lower than earlier claims that one-sixth of the planet could dry out at once.
The study, led by Dr Udit Bhatia, with co-authors from IITGN and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany, examines how droughts in different parts of the world align in time and what controls their spread. “We treated drought onsets as events in a global network. If two distant regions entered drought within a short time window, they were considered synchronised,” explained Dr Bhatia, the lead author and the principal investigator of the Machine Intelligence and Resilience Lab and the AI Resilience and Command (ARC) Centre at IITGN.
By mapping thousands of such connections, the team identified ‘drought hubs’ in Australia, South America, southern Africa, and parts of North America. In parallel, they analysed historical yields of wheat, rice, maize, and soybean to assess how moderate drought affects food production.
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